Thinking about poetry from the point of view of composition and personal reading

Wednesday, 29 October 2014

SOME NOTES ON EDWARD THOMAS’S ROADS ANDRAIN

I felt that last week I
brought out some of the complexity and contradiction
in Roads and Rain, but didn’t sufficiently sort out how each poem does fit together. A problem that happens to me sometimes when I notice something I hadn't seen before and so find myself rethinking what I had thought I would say So what follows is an attempt to do draw things together a little without, I hope, giving the impression that there are, unambiguous readings of
either of these poems. Edward Thomas, as I've mentioned, is
a poet who doesn’t reveal how difficult he is until you get into a detailed
reading. And his own sense of the final inarticulacy
he expresses in the face of being as he experiences it, is something we need to ‘factor into’ our own
readings of him.

ROADS

‘I love roads. . .’ is almost
naïve in its simplicity. And so is ‘are
my favourite gods.’ But the thought
between is much less simple. The
grammar suddenly becomes strange. How
does a goddess, or anyone else, ‘dwell/far along invisible’.

Let’s assume that this means
‘far along (a road to the extent that they become) invisible’. He loves the gods/goddesses of roads and they
live invisibly on the roads and are expressed in the distance the roads travel.

That interpretation leads into the theme of
distance in the next stanza. ‘Roads go
on’. We human beings, contrasted with
the roads, ‘forget’. Forgetting is one
way of not ‘going on’. It is a kind of stopping of consciousness, memory. One way of reading the next passage would be
to say that we humans also ‘are forgotten’.
We, as it were, lose track of the road and the road goes on beyond
us. We are forgotten (by the road)
‘like a star/That shoots and is gone.’
The star is used as an image of the momentary, a shooting star seen in
the sky and then gone. But on balance,
I’d prefer to read it differently and to draw attention to the comma/pause
after ‘forget’ and say that ‘and are forgotten’ in fact refers to the
roads. It’s the road that ‘shoots and is
gone’.

Taking up the star/sky
imagery, in the next stanza (stanza 3) we come back down to ‘earth’. But then he talks about our having made the
roads. We’ve made roads, but they (like
the star image which previously referred to the road not, as I interpreted, ‘us’)
fade ‘so soon’. But at the same time
they ‘so long endure’. ET gets into
one of his contradictions: the road
fades quickly on the one hand, but it endures a long time on the other. I take it he means, ‘according to how you
think of it’. If you are on a road and
look into the distance it does ‘fade’, vanishes, but if you are, as it were’ looking at it geographically from above, or historically
in time, then it endures. It’s there all along its (geographical
length) and its endured all its
(historical) time since being built.

In this third stanza, ET
becomes ‘poetic’ slipping into Georgian ‘tis’ and ‘doth’. The first line of stanza three sounds like a
wise old countryman’s saying. He’s
switched from the ‘unearthly’ star and as it were ‘come down to earth’. But

The ‘doth’ comes in a
half-quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where the folklorish Ariel sings
a lament for the supposedly drowned father of Ferdinand

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change.

It’s a passage about
transformation, the dead person’s become a part of the physical world around
him. His fading is a kind of
changing. In Thomas’s terms, the road
fades but also suffers a ‘sea-change’ or perhaps a kind of ‘earth-change’.

In the next stanza he gives
an image of the (non tarmac) road which gleams in the sun like a stream; but it wouldn’t gleam like that, he says, ‘If
we trod it not again’. But this last
clauses is ambiguous. It could mean
that our action in treading it makes it gleam like that. And at the same time, perhaps, it could mean
that if we were dead, it wouldn’t have that gleam. In a sense the road’s beauty depends on our
awareness of it, our being alive. The
last idea seems to lead into the idea of
loneliness in the next stanza. As if the
road ‘needs’ us, our awareness of it.

‘They are lonely

While we sleep’

The road needs the traveller, and while we sleep the traveller is ‘a dream
only’ – of the road’s.

In the next stanza 6, roads are described as winding ‘into the
night’ . They from dawn to dusk
through the ‘clouds like sheep/On the
mountains of sleep.

The road seems, like a
person, to travel towards ‘the night’.
And in stanza 7 the winding continues past, possibly, Heaven or
Hell. Not quite. ET says that the turn may ‘reveal’ Heaven or
‘conceal’ Hell. It’s not clear if the
revelation is what the traveller experiences, or the road itself. I really think this stanza is unclear! The road is turned into a kind of ‘road of
life’ which the pilgrim may follow. The
references to Heaven and Hell don’t quite seem to fit (to me).

But, in stanza 8 the viewpoint clarifies and becomes that of
Thomas himself. He never wearies of it, even though it goes on for ever.

It goes back for ever too. In stanza
9 Thomas brings in his historical theme, the ’Lob theme’ of the British/Celtic
origins of many roads, older than English now.
He evokes the spirit of Elen in
the Mabinogion, and moves into his sense of a god ‘abiding in the trees’. In the next stanzas he celebrates her
‘laughter’ . She is a kind of ‘genius’
of the place. Her laughter is somehow embedded in the ‘irrelevant’ song of the thrush, and the chanticleer (cockerel) who ‘calls back to their own night’ the dead troops. And they ‘make loneliness/With their light
footsteps’ press’. The, as it were,
invoke, induce, loneliness in being dead.
Their steps are now light because they are spirits, as is Helen herself.

So Helen is the presiding
goddess of the road (from Roman times), and the road reminds him not just of
the ancestral mythological past but of the present ‘troops’ coming back over
this same timeless road.

The idea of ‘troops’ is taken
up in the next stanza, when he says ‘Now all roads lead to France’, think of
the roads now, not as returning, but
as leaving. When they leave the ‘tread of the living’ is
heavy’. And he reminds is that this
contrasts with that of the dead who ‘Returning lightly dance’. ‘Dance’ sounds strangely celebratory, and
perhaps recalls the ‘bright irrelevant things’ the thrush sings.

Then he combines the leaving
and going themes when he says

‘Whatever the road bring

To me or take from me (my italics)

The ‘They’ in the in the
third line of this stanza seems to refer to the troops. The idea of loneliness is now change to that
of ‘company’. Somehow the returning
spirits of the dead ‘keep my company’.
They do that, he shows in the last climactic stanza, by as it were being
inhabitants of earth, of being part of
the substance of the roads, the place, the land itself. They, like the aspens, tread lightly and quietly, and yet in a sense
‘dominate’ the place, are more part of
the land than the ‘brief multitude’ of the modern towns.

Perhaps we can read into this
a sense of dedication on ET’s part, a sense that he belongs with those ghosts, the soldiers. They in a sense overcome his solitude even
if it is with their death and merging into the land, the roads.

The overall development of
the poem, then, looks like this

Roads are presided over by
gods

yet are man-made

yet also timeless, (seen from
‘above’)

yet also vanishing (seen from
ground level as we walk).

They are lonely for the
traveller

who confirms their being.

Yet they wind on out of sight

and reveal Heaven,

and conceal Hell as they pass
them

ET is never weary of
travelling these roads

hard work as that is,

as they go on for ever.

The ancient god Helen

is ‘in’ the
roadside trees

and beneath the timbers

inhabited by the ancient dead

and her laughter is in the
songs

of the decorative thrush

and the crow of the cockerel

whose call is calling back
the troops

The troops’ (dead) footsteps

returning from France are
light

as Helen’s are

And now (for him) the
footsteps lead to France,

and their tread in that
outward direction is heavy

as opposed to the light dance
of the returning dead

Whatever the road brings him
or takes from him

they are still company,

and a deeper presence to him
than anything else

in the local hubbub of the
modern and the urban.

The poem’s conclusion moves
towards a kind of overcoming of the sense of loneliness that seems to plague
Thomas, as we see in Rain. It’s as if
his decision to go to France is a way of dealing with that. He is leaving England in order to belong the
more to it.

ET wrote many other poems
about roads, and of course he was a great walker of rural roads. It’s interesting to contemplate the question
he raises in the poem as to which is the more ‘real’ the road or the
traveller. And we might re-read Frost’s
poem dedicated to ET, The Road Not
Taken, in this light.

RAIN

The ‘bleak hut’ locates the poem in war,
Thomas as a soldier in training. But he
is dealing still with identity as solitude, and ‘me/remembering again that I
shall die’. The presence of the rain
suggests its absence to his ears when he’s dead. He’s imagining his body being rained on and
his having no awareness of that. The rain
washes him cleaner than he has ever been (since he’s imagining being dead)
since he was born, but not just
that: it’s ‘this solitude’ he ‘was born
into’. Solitude is what he loses, just as in other
ways his awareness was diffused over Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire in
Adlestrop, into the scent of Old
Man. He concludes the first ‘movement’
of this poem by summing up: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon.’ They are blessed because they can’t feel it.

But second theme of the poem
is love. In line 8 he moves into a kind
of sympathy, thinking of others beyond
his own solitude, but only briefly
because those he is thinking about, turn out to be those ‘whom once I loved’ (my italics).
They are now imaged as themselves solitary and lying awake (like ET
himself as he writes) listening to the rain.
They may be in pain (and we think of wounded soldiers) or they may be ‘helpless
among the living and the dead’ (as on a battlefield)

and then they are compared to
broken reeds, ‘like me who have no love’.
He is different from them in that they are lying out there ‘thus in
sympathy’. I’m not at all sure what
this phrase means, but it’s possible he means ‘sympathy’ in the sense that they
are in the same position as he is and he can understand their brokenness and solitude.

He emphasises the broken
reeds, broken music, broken vulnerability. He may also be thinking more generally of his
disappointment in,or in his treatment of, people he once loved since a broken reed is also a term for
an unreliable person who lets you down.

He comes back to the theme of
love, now very blankly stating that he has ‘no love’, or at least no love which the rain has not
dissolved. There is love left, and that
is love of death, ‘if love it be’. And
he wonders if love for something perfect is possible. But if it is it a completely reliable kind of
love.

Thomas sees himself as
incapable of (human) love yet many readers have found his voice as a poet
loveable. Perhaps this is connected by
his doubts about who and what he us. He
is neither of nature nor of heaven. He ends up finding some other dimension where
he has lost his self and yet is not dead, and that is often a loss of self (The other,
Lob, Aspens) can be found in the composition of poetry. The poetry is unnatural in that it is based
upon the relationship between between
language and reality, and the poet spends his time trying to overcome that
separation; or he finds himself by
losing himself in the poem. Talking about
loss as perfectly as he can, embodies a kind of loss of loss. This figure seems
common in much of Thomas.

The love of death theme of
course echoes Keats’s ‘half in love with easeful death’ in Ode to a
Nightingale. And his sense belonging in
death echoes Wordsworth’s description of Lucy after her death Lucy -